Part 33 (1/2)
”I do not speak to either of them. I have made a business of offending them. Yanna was the inventor of the Duval romance; and Alida Van Hoosen thinks her thoughts. They have been living together.”
”I am awfully sorry you have offended them. Can you not be friends with Yanna?”
”I don't want to be friends with her. I have quarreled with Harry, too. The idea of Harry coming to tell me my sins! I suppose Yanna sent him. Well, he heard the truth about his own sins, for once in his life! Mamma, I have quarreled with every one but you.”
As she was speaking, Harry entered. He took his mother in his arms, and then turned to Rose. ”Good morning, Rose,” he said pleasantly. But Rose looked past him, and without a word in reply, she left the house.
”I am sorry you have quarreled with your sister, Harry,” said Mrs.
Filmer. ”If ever she needed your countenance and aid, it is now.”
”It is not my fault. Has she told you about the last----?”
”I have heard a dozen versions of the affair. Poor girl!”
”Mother, you ought not to condone her sins.”
”You made no objections to my condoning your sins, Harry--much more flagrant ones, too. And I do not think your wife need to put on so many airs about poor Rose.”
”Rose has wantonly wounded Yanna's feelings very often.”
”Poor feelings! I wonder how they endured the pretty Cora's extravagances of every kind.”
”Mother!”
”Well, Harry, there is no use in our quarreling. Where is Antony?”
”In Arizona.”
”It is a great shame. I shall make your father go and see him.”
”There is no necessity. A word of contrition from Rose will bring him home. Without that word, nothing will bring him. You had better get Rose to write to him. A dozen words will do.”
”She will never write one.”
”Then she had better get a divorce.”
”And lose all Antony's money!”
”She has behaved shamefully to Antony. I will not talk any more about her.”
”However, she is going to entertain quietly; and her own family _must_ support her. You may tell your wife I said so.”
”Did you have a pleasant summer, mother?”
Then Mrs. Filmer began a long complaint of the weather, and the weary hours her husband spent in the libraries, and the exorbitant charges, and the dreadful laundry work, and finally she opened one of her trunks, and took out of it some presents for Yanna and the child. So the morning went rapidly away, and Harry stayed to lunch with his father and mother, and then went downtown and attended to some business for them; so that the day was all broken up and spoiled, and he resolved to go home and take Yanna her presents.
When he entered the parlor of his own home, he was astonished to see Yanna sitting at a little Dutch table, drinking tea with a woman in the regulation dress of the Salvation Army--astonished to see that she had been weeping; and still more lost in amazement when the guest stood up and faced him, for it was undoubtedly Cora Mitchin.
She looked with grave eyes straight at Harry, who had paused in the middle of the room, and said: ”Mr. Filmer, I came here to-day to ask Mrs. Filmer's pardon. You may see that she has forgiven me.”
”Miss Young,” said Adriana, rising, ”it is my wish that you tell Mr.